ArchivesNovember 2011

Update, 6.10 pm: Make that seven years! The City of Berkeley checked again on the dates and reports in to us that Center Street was closed to one-way traffic when Berkeley City College was being constructed, in approximately March 2004. The Arpeggio project has had the street closed since June 2006 — first for the demolition of the previous building on the site in 2006, then for construction which began in 2008.

Investigators for the Berkeley Fire Department say the five-alarm fire that broke out on November 18th at 2441 Haste Street originated in and around the elevator machinery in the basement of the five-story building, and that the fire was accidental in nature.

Phil Kamlarz, city manager for eight years and a city employee for 36, retired this month. He first became a Berkeley city employee as a temporary associate accountant in the Berkeley Public Library in 1975, and a year later transferred to the city manager’s office. He became assistant city manager in 1987, and then acting city manager in 2003, before getting his full appointment the following year.

Starting in January, shoppers at Andronico’s Markets should start seeing upgrades in the chain’s remaining five stores, including new refrigeration cases, revamped displays, and shelves stocked with additional goods.

DOWNWARD DOGInnerstellar Pilates & Yoga opened in mid-November across the street from Berkeley Bowl. It includes two movement studios, a wellness center and a retail boutique for yoga and pilates props and lifestyle clothing. Its website stresses that Innerstellar offers “only the most potent styles” of pilates and yoga.

Les Waters, an Obie-winning Brit who has served as Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s assistant artistic director for eight years, is leaving the theater to take over as artistic director at The Actors Theater of Louisville, Kentucky.

The utterance of the words ‘virgin’, ‘mistress’, and ‘seduce’ were enough to get Otto Preminger’s film The Moon is Blue banned in Boston in 1953. Three years later, however, things went from bad to worse for the Legion of Decency upon the release of director Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll, which — while avoiding its predecessor’s intemperate language — went far beyond The Moon is Blue by actually depicting the seduction of a virgin.

As demolition crews prepared to partially demolish the fire-ravaged building at 2441 Haste Street Monday afternoon, a group of former tenants of the building were planning to meet this evening to discuss securing settlements from the building’s owners and fixing damage from a fire which, they say, could have been prevented.

Five years ago the steps leading from Hilgard Avenue down to LeRoy were a tangled mess, ill lit, broken in spots, and dotted with graffiti. Scraggly trees and brambles grew unrestrained along the steps’ borders.